2026 Best of Music City Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Music City Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

Run by The Tennessean, Nashville's daily newspaper, the 2026 Best of Music City Community's Choice Awards is the city's homegrown readers choice program. The format is the familiar newspaper best-of style, in which local businesses, organisations and places compete across categories and readers decide the winners by public vote.

Second Street is the balloting platform, the specialist the paper relies on across its contest portfolio, and the ballot itself lives on the paper's contests domain, tennessean.gannettcontests.com. The 2026 ballot page sits at tennessean.gannettcontests.com/2026-Best-of-Music-City-Communitys-Choice-Awards, with parallel pages for the nomination round and the winners list in each edition year.

One feature sets this program apart from many readers choice ballots: the outcome is not only digital. The Tennessean reveals the finalists and winners in a printed commemorative section published in the newspaper, including their details, so a win here lands in physical print as well as on a web page. For a Nashville business, that print placement is part of what the award is worth.

Facts at a glance

The dated record, which editions ran and when the 2026 windows fell

Four straight cycles have run, in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, making the program an established annual fixture on The Tennessean's contest calendar rather than a one-off. Each year has its own ballot page, nomination page and winners page on the gannettcontests.com domain, so the paper's archive of this program is unusually complete for a readers choice contest of this size.

The 2026 cycle ran in two phases. Nominations opened May 1 and closed May 22, 2026, a round the program describes with the line that it all begins with nominations. The public vote then opened July 10, 2026 and closed July 25, 2026, a window of roughly two weeks during which the Second Street ballot was live and supporters could pick nominees in each category.

The category roster is absent from the ballot page, and so is any per-supporter vote limit or eligibility rule; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps matter for anyone planning support, because the number of categories and the frequency rule shape how a campaign is organised. The 2027 cycle has not been announced; when The Tennessean opens it, its dates will appear on a new ballot page in the same series.

How a supporter votes in the 2026 ballot

Voting in the Best of Music City Community's Choice Awards is a plain public vote on a Second Street Ballot. During the voting window, a supporter heads to the ballot page on tennessean.gannettcontests.com, moves through the categories, and selects a nominee in each one before submitting. No purchase, membership or newspaper subscription is stated anywhere on the ballot as a condition of taking part.

The two-phase shape is worth keeping in mind. By the time the July vote opens, the nominee list is already fixed, because the May nomination round decided who appears on the ballot. A business that missed the May 1-22, 2026 nomination window cannot be written in during July; its next route onto the ballot is the following cycle's nomination round. That makes the spring dates as important to a campaign as the summer ones.

The Tennessean attaches no voting frequency rule and no eligibility rule to this ballot, so the live form alone decides how frequently a single supporter may vote and whether any sign-in is required. Supporters who want to plan a return visit should simply follow what the ballot asks on the day. Once voting closes on July 25, the ballot goes dark and the outcome moves to the printed winners section in the newspaper.

How this ballot sits beside its Tennessee neighbours

Tennessee has an unusually crowded best-of lineup, and the Best of Music City Community's Choice Awards is the Nashville entry in it. Elsewhere in the state, the Chattanooga Times Free Press runs its own Best of the Best ballot, Knoxville's Cityview runs the Cityview Best of the Best, and CommunityVotes operates a separate Chattanooga program. Every one of these has a separate publisher and a separate calendar.

Two further neighbours round out the picture. The BroadwayWorld Nashville Awards and the BroadwayWorld Memphis Awards cover theatre rather than general business, and the Knoxville HBA Parade of Homes covers home building. None of them competes for the same ballot as Best of Music City, but a business operating across Tennessee can appear in several of these programs in the same year.

What distinguishes the Tennessean's program within this lineup is the print reveal. The finalists and winners are published in a commemorative printed section of the newspaper, which none of the web-native neighbours replicate. Its four confirmed editions, 2023 through 2026, also give it one of the longer continuous runs among the state's readers choice ballots, and its Second Street hosting ties it to the same balloting infrastructure the paper uses year round.

Strengthening support in the Best of Music City ballot

Because this ballot is a two-phase public vote, effective support starts with the calendar. Any business hoping to appear on the 2027 ballot must be nominated in the spring round, and one already on the 2026 ballot had its real push window between July 10 and July 25. Support gathered outside those dates has nowhere to land, so timing is the first lever.

The second lever is the ballot's own structure. Supporters pick nominees category by category, so a business's ask is specific, visit the ballot, find the category, pick us. The ballot page carries no printed per-supporter limit, so the live form governs how frequently a single supporter may vote. Asking customers directly, in person, by email or through a business's own channels, is the route that depends on no assumptions at all.

On outside help, the ballot page prints no rule about purchased support, and this page makes no promise about what any paid service achieves. The general picture, including what organizers typically say and where the risks sit, is covered in our award votes overview. Whatever route a business takes, the printed winners section means the result becomes public in the newspaper, so the only support that counts is the kind the ballot logs during the July window.